The Modernist Shakespeare

Abstract

This is a major study of the history of Shakespeare criticism in the modern era. Every epoch recreates its classic icons — and for literary culture none is more central nor more protean than Shakespeare. Even though finding the authentic Shakespeare has been a goal of scholarship since the 18th century, he has always been constructed as a contemporary author. This book charts the construction of Shakespeare as a 20th-century Modernist text by redirecting ‘new historicist’ methods to an investigation of the social roots of contemporary Shakespeare criticism itself. Beginning with the formation of professionalism as an ideology in the Victorian age, this book describes the widespread attempts to save the values of the culturalist tradition, in reformulated ‘Modernist’ guise, from the threat of professionalist positivism in modernized universities. The tension between professionalism and culturalism gave rise to the Modernist Shakespeare of G. Wilson Knight, E. M. W. Tillyard, and American and British New Critics, and still conditions the postmodernist Shakespearean criticism of contemporary feminists, deconstructors, and ‘new historicists’.

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